Ten years ago this morning, January 4, 2001, a half-blind handyman awoke in his Terre Haute, Indiana house. He shuffled into his bathroom. He raked his fingers through his gray beard. He glanced into the mirror – and then he froze.

What he saw staring back stunned Phil McCord. Later, when the nuns called it a "miracle," that word would trouble Phil – and it would continue to vex him for years. He thought: A miracle? Really? What did I possibly do to deserve that? Why me? Why not the kids with cancer in the hospital down the road? How will I ever I repay this debt? Does this mean I must do something different with my life? These were the questions – and this was the internal tension – that eventually drew me to this tale.

Just one day earlier, on a whim, Phil had wandered into an ornate basilica at the college and convent where he worked as head of maintenance. At Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Phil mended the old boilers, the aging pipes, the ancient rooftops, everything. He had settled into a fourth-row pew, alone in the sanctuary, choked with anxiety. Then Phil did something quite rare for him. He prayed to God. That had not been his intent when he strolled in.

Phil was raised in the Baptist faith but, 50-some years later, he wasn’t particularly devout. He was a man of science. An engineer. His fundamental philosophy: seeing was believing. As his wife liked to joke, the only times Phil sat in that chapel were to attend funerals for the nuns. Phil was, however, in some pain, facially disfigured and he couldn’t see a thing from his right eye. All those problems had surfaced abruptly three months earlier when a routine cataract surgery didn’t go so routinely. He had tried multiple eye drops prescribed by his doctor. None soothed his fire-red, half-closed, swollen right eye. So inside the basilica, he decided to have an informal chat with God. He felt he was out of options. A sports coach at the college, Phil tossed a spiritual Hail Mary pass.

He asked God not for a cure, but for the strength to simply go through with a grisly eye operation that doctors had deemed his only chance at regaining full vision. The procedure terrified Phil. A surgeon planned to slice out his diseased right cornea and replace it with a cornea freshly harvested from another person – a dead person. McCord was a man who could rebuild or retool anything. But the transplant and its many possible, gruesome complications left him mired in dread. The born fixer was contemplating not fixing his eye.

After he explained his situation to God in what he later called an “incoherent” and “rambling” appeal, he decided to ask for some extra help from the convent’s founder – Mother Theodore Guerin, a French-born nun who had died in 1856, 16 years after launching the Catholic outpost in the Indiana wilderness. Her body was buried beneath the church and her presence could be seen all over campus – in paintings, signs, posters, and other memorabilia. As Mother Theodore’s present-day employee, Phil likened his prayer to asking the boss for a favor: “If you have God’s ear, if you could exercise that on my behalf, this would be a good time. If you could help me get through this, I would appreciate anything that you could do for me.”

At the mirror the next morning, Phil immediately noticed that his long-drooping right eyelid had returned to its normal position. The pulsing redness that caused everyone to describe the eye as “angry looking,” had eased to a gentler shade of pink. His vision remained cloudy. But as he had slept, the watery heaviness that caused the right side of his face to sag had disappeared. So had the ache. He dashed into his bedroom to ask his wife, a nurse, if the eye looked better to her. It did, she said. It definitely looked better.

Phil never put sequence of events together until he visited his transplant surgeon a few weeks later for a scheduled pre-op exam. The doctor was equally surprised at the state of the right cornea.

“What did you do?” the doctor asked.

“What did I do?” Phil responded with a bit of an edge. He had done nothing. Then he remembered.

“Well, I just said a prayer.”

“Well, it worked,” the doctor said.

“Is this unusual?”

“Oh yeah, very unusual.”

The doctor could not explain it. No doctor would ever offer a solid, scientific reason for the spontaneous improvement.

The transplant operation was cancelled. Weeks later, a simple laser zap removed a thin layer of film that had grown on the artificial lens a doctor had implanted in his right eye during the cataract removal. (Such cloudy layers are common side effects of cataract removal). The vision in Phil’s eye was instantly crisp and clear – for the first time since he was a little boy.

Now the whispers at the convent gained volume: “Did you hear about Phil? … Have you seen his eye? … It’s a miracle! … This is what we’ve been waiting for!”

When Phil had accepted the job as maintenance chief a few years earlier, he didn’t know he was walking into a remote hub of miracle-hungry nuns. Since the early 1900s, they had been hunting for two Vatican-approved miracles to see their founder, Mother Theodore, elevated to sainthood. Two verified miracles carried out in the name of a saintly candidate: that’s what the Catholic hierarchy required in order for a person to be canonized. The first miracle in Mother Theodore’s name had been investigated and authorized by the pope in 1997. Now, the inexplicably healed right eye of the convent’s own handyman might help deliver the final prize.

But Phil wasn’t so sure about all the miracle speculation and chatter. Sure, he was happy that his cure might help the sisters realize a century-long quest. He liked them, liked what they stood for, and he was willing do whatever they asked to help affirm the alleged miracle – including submitting to additional physical examinations. In his head, however, those old questions rumbled and reverberated: “Why would God pick me – of all people - for healing? I’m just an ordinary guy.” He didn’t even attend church regularly.

The real question was this: When Church investigators later convened a tribunal to assess and judge his healing – when the priests who ran that secret court eventually asked Phil to place his hand on a Bible and swear to tell the truth – what would he say?

His mysterious cure could help his co-workers and friends – the sisters - bask in the most joyous day of their lives. His tale could lead to a pope-validated miracle and sainthood for Mother Theodore.

But in a windowless, basement room in downtown Indianapolis, when the priests finally stared across a long table at McCord and asked him, point blank, if he believed in miracles, how would the engineer respond?

Learn more about “The Third Miracle” at my author website: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorBillBriggs
The Third Miracle: An Ordinary Man, a Medical Mystery, and a Trial of Faith